Fuckness (16 page)

“
That’s terrible,” I said, but I didn’t really mean it. I felt too exhausted to feel any type of emotion at that point. My body had melted into the booth and become just as feeling as the musty cushions. “I’d like to hear you play.”

“
I’d like to play somethin.”

“
So why not.” I was kind of hoping it would pass the time a little bit. Besides, I’d never seen anyone actually play music before except hideous Ms. Mapes, the music teacher. She’d sit on her knees in front of the class and talk endlessly in a tone of voice that suggested we were all in kindergarten while these hideous spitballs formed on her lips, stretching elastically back and forth. I remember sitting there, paying more attention to the spit strings, waiting anxiously to see when they would break, than anything ol Ms. Mapes happened to be braying.

“
I guess I’ll swing round here and play somethin but there’s one condition. When ev’rybody here starts laughin, and b’lieve you me they will, you just go ahead and stand up and walk out, cause I won’t be able to look at ya after that.”

I didn’t know if I’d really be able to move or not but I nodded my head anyway.

“
Get set,” he said. He bent down and unlatched the shiny guitar case. “I sure do wish I had my bandanna. Always played better in a bandanna. Plug me in?” He pointed to an outlet at the bottom of the wall. I plugged the amp into it.

I felt incredibly sorry for Johnny Metal. Maybe it was because I knew he wasn’t lying. I probably wouldn’t get the chance to talk to him after this.

“
So why are you here?” I asked.

“
Well,” he grunted, positioning the guitar on his knee, holding an old chipped pick between his teeth as he did so. He took the pick out and cleared his throat. “I guess I came here to see if I could pawn this guitar. Then I decided I needed some whiskey, so I came here. Maybe I’m just here for you. Maybe you’re the only reason I’m here. Sometimes I do things without knowing why. One minute I was sitting in a friend’s apartment, the next I was hoppin on a train to come to Milltown. Who the hell knows.”

Metal flipped the amp on and lightly strummed the guitar. “I don’t sing no more so you’re gonna get the instrumental version. The real soul’s always been in the guitar anyway.”

“
It was nice meeting you, Johnny,” I said.

“
Likewise.” He shrugged his head, made a wild chicken motion and laid into the guitar.

The paralysis I felt automatically lifted. It was like he just started playing without really knowing what, without any kind of preparation or any fuckness like that. Chills dripped their way icily down my spine. And then there was the other sound—the rolling, banshee-like shriek of laughter. It was Gout, the man I’d been looking at under the spot of exposed insulation. Looking at him earlier, I wouldn’t have thought he was capable of making such sounds. Nevertheless, there he was, bent over, a cup trembling in his hand, a coughing fit the only thing breaking up his laughter.

The other people in the bar were doing the same thing. The bartender pounded his heavy hand on the warped wooden bar. The guy in the opposite corner, Death Swamp, rolled around on the dusty floor. Slow Willy, standing only about five feet away, pointed as he laughed.

I had told myself I wasn’t going to look. I looked around the bar at all those fucking blob wastes, laughing away like asses and I told myself I wasn’t going to do that. I wanted to listen to the music. And I did, for as long as I could. I sat there looking down at that disgusting table until, finally, the sound of the laughter drowned out the sound of the guitar.

I looked at Metal.

It was one of the most amazing things I ever saw. After the first glance, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The music became like plinking dream notes, coming from somewhere way off in the distance. I was focused in so close to his face that there were moments when I was unaware he was even playing an instrument at all. His tongue lolled out, vast and pink. His lips pursed. His eyebrows went way back. His eyes bugged out. Sometimes he would glance down at the guitar and those eyebrows would go back and his mouth would draw up and he’d raise his shoulders, all at the same time, and he’d look like he was terrified as all hell of that instrument. There were other things. Other things that are truly indescribable. Certain movements, ridiculous affectations, all contributed to some unbelievable show. And I felt the laugh, somewhere deep within me. Whenever you have a laugh buried somewhere deep in your viscera, there’s really no way to stop it—and it feels so good to let it come out. It’s what I imagined a snake shedding its skin must feel like, to laugh off some outer layer of repression.

Those drunkass blobs were all still laughing away. Meat Sandwich had laughed until throwing up. He now rolled around on the ground beside his vomit. I imagined they had all pissed their pants quite some time ago. I wouldn’t let Metal see me laugh at him. That was part of the promise. So I stood up, amazingly easily, with my body hurting like hell, my lungs burning, and took off for the entrance.

Now, apparently, they were finding everything hilarious. As I crossed the bar I noticed Slow Willy, the man who’d been pointing at Metal, was now pointing at me, as if to direct all the blobs’ attention in my direction. How long had Metal put up with this? I could feel their malicious stares on my back and I inadvertently started snapping my head to the side and snapping my fingers. Both of those actions hurt worse than all fuck, but I couldn’t control myself. I just wanted to be out of that smoky yellow tomb.

Just as I got to the entrance, I heard someone shout, “Horns!”

How observant, I thought.

The more laughter I suppressed, the more I had to look at all those blobbish faces around me, the less I felt like laughing and the angrier I became. The red crawlies were back, scouring the inside of my skin, blurring my vision, lifting me up out of that booth.

I had no control over myself.

I couldn’t hear Metal’s guitar anymore. The only sounds I heard were the heavy throbbing of my blood and the irritating laugh of all the drunks. My vision turned red. I couldn’t see anything.

I could only hear and feel.

I felt skin in the palms of my hands. I felt the skin turn wet. I felt the horns punching into flesh and soft guts. I heard the fine shift of laughter turning to screams.

I don’t know if I spun around the room or the room spun around me or how long it went on. Flesh and more flesh in my hands. So much hot wetness covering me. The occasional feel of the horns scraping on bone. The scents of blood and puke and piss and shit all mingling together and cloying at the back of my nose.

Slowly, the screams were eliminated.

I could hear Metal’s guitar.

The red faded away, replaced by a different kind of red.

I stood up by the bar, leaning against it, looking out over the room. The room was covered in blood.

The drunks were indiscernible from one another. One of them was propped in a chair, his scalp peeled back from his skull. Another one lay face down on the floor, his back ripped from neck to waist, his spine exposed. Another one lay across a table, nearly ripped in two, his head and torso facing the ceiling, his groin against the table.

I looked at Metal, sitting there in the chair and facing the opposite wall, playing his guitar. His eyes were closed and he was covered in other people’s blood. A piece of intestine was draped across his left arm.

I could feel the blood covering me turning sticky. I turned and headed for the front door, leaving Metal to play for an audience that wouldn’t laugh. The now deafening refrain of his guitar followed me outside.

Once out there, I thought for sure I was going to throw up. But when I opened my mouth, I started laughing. I leaned up against one of those giant, rusted dumpsters, my whole body shaking. I wasn’t just laughing at Metal, I laughed at the absurdity of everything: his faces, the horns atop my head, the drunks who went there every night, who no longer even thought about why they went, who died there, Metal’s music taking them to whatever afterlife awaited them.

I tried to stop laughing because I think people usually look pretty stupid when they laugh. The more I tried not to laugh, the harder it came. Just like that, the sadness and its leaden wave had receded and, rather than feeling weightless, I was burdened with laughter. It was an amazing gift Johnny Metal had. However unwanted it was, it was truly amazing.

Chapter Fifteen

The Boy With Horns

Eventually I found my way out of the alley. The laughter had died down and I knew there was a foreboding wave of darkness waiting for me. I wondered why, when I had feelings of intense joy or happiness, I could always sense that black wave, cresting above and threatening to crash down on me at any time but, when I was actually having one of my sad spells, it felt like it was never going to end—like I would never get the happiness back.

I figured it must have been around two or three o’clock in the morning. Most of the businesses looked like they were closing up for the night. A few of the neon signs flickered and then went off. The people in the streets were twice as loud as they were earlier. I’m pretty sure this had something to do with them being twice as drunk as they were earlier. The people in pairs or groups engaged in overly militant babble. They were either going to go somewhere else and, “fuck some shit up,” “get into some shit,” or, apparently if there was no shit already in existence, they were going to “start some shit.” The winos and drunks who were alone wandered along the street, sometimes losing their way and actually curving into the street, mumbling things under their breath, vigorous and confused conversations, imbued with an unusual passion. Or they screamed various names out loud. Sometimes they yelled them at random windows above the bars, “Tina! Tina!!” Sometimes they merely yelled them at the heavens, as though crooning for some lover who was dead and gone or maybe, depending on their blood-alcohol level, never there in the first place.

There weren’t many cars in this section of the Tar District. I assumed most of these people were either too poor to own cars or, more probable, had long ago had their licenses revoked for vehicular manslaughter. Whenever a car did come into sight, it traveled at speeds highly inappropriate. A loud roar, a flash of lights, and they were gone.

I tried to stay out of the faint pool of the streetlamps so no one could see me. I secretly willed the horns to go away. Without them, I didn’t think anyone would really even notice me. By the standards presented around me, I wasn’t even exceptionally ugly. I moved slowly, barely lifting my feet off the cement. My body was essentially numb, but I felt that grinding bonefeel starting up in the joints. If I stopped to rest again, I was sure I wouldn’t be able to deal with the pain of moving.

I knew Uncle Skad lived by the river and I figured it was maybe two miles at most in front of me. Slowly, I had wandered out of the lively section of the Tar District and into what the mother and father called the slums. Apparently, even though Walnut was a horrible, hideous place to live, it was still better than the slums of the Tar District. Looking at it now, where the streetlights ended, I could see why the parents made that assertion.

Walnut contained houses in disarray, the ground threatening to consume some of them, but the Tar District contained an area that had
once been
houses. Now, they were entirely dilapidated—a pile of bricks, a heap of wood. To my left, knotted anemic grass covered a vacant lot. If there had once been a house or business there, it had been torn down a long time ago. To my right there were completely demolished houses. They didn’t go unused, however. A long tarp was slung over the top of the piles and I could see little fires glowing in there. I imagined seeing the whites of their eyes, peering out into the darkness. Further down the road, in front of me, a group of homeless guys had started a fire in a barrel. I stopped in my tracks because I didn’t want to draw their attention. It’s not that I was afraid of them hurting me or any fuckness like that. I didn’t want to make them feel watched or studied, even though that was exactly what was happening.

I stood there and watched them. They were virtually indistinguishable from one another. Their clothes had all gone indiscernible shades of brown or black. The men, and everyone I saw was a man, had long beards and something on their heads. They held out their hands to the fire, trying to let its pitiful flames spread warmth throughout their bodies. Maybe that’s why so many of them drank, I thought. I was sure the alcohol did a much better job of spreading the warmth than that weak little fire did.

Standing there, the sadness came back in full force. The black and yellow wave of soulhurt hit me hard. It started raining again, icy rain. I stood there, letting it beat down on my horns until my head was hot and whumming and my lungs burned. I let the rain peel away the blood and the stink of death. There was something inside of me telling me this was where I belonged. If there was a place where people who didn’t belong belonged, this was it. None of these people wore horns, true, but they might as well have. Everything they had had been stripped away and I felt like I didn’t have anything either. Whether I had done it to myself or not, I wasn’t sure, but something had been stripped away. Being a murderer, a mass murderer now, I guess, I didn’t even have my morality to cling to.